With the increase in the popularity of the web (or World Wide Web), more and more websites are tracking users' browsing activities for legitimate or illegitimate reasons, such as targeted advertisements or privacy theft. Hidden websites may perform usage tracking in the background unknown to a user while the user visits a seemingly unrelated website. As a result, user privacy can be seriously compromised.
Typically, websites rely on local data storage in a device for usage tracking. For example, browser cookie is commonly used as a local storage mechanism for websites to store tracking data. Traditional privacy management tools are largely based on managing commonly used website storage mechanisms such as browser cookies. However, as technologies evolve, the browser continues to support new mechanisms for local storages. Thus, new opportunities for usage tracking are made available for websites to take advantage of. As a result, these traditional privacy management tools may give only a false sense of security without keeping up with the newly introduced mechanisms for usage tracking.
Furthermore, the ever increasing number of third party plugin modules or extensions installed for a browser also contributes to the complexity of managing usage tracking. Usually, these plugins are provided with their own private local storages requiring separate interfaces for external access. Thus, a user may be required to keep track of a constantly changing number of local data stores and/or interfaces for managing usage tracking or removing usage tracking data.
Therefore, existing approaches for managing usage tracking do not provide a user with an option to control usage tracking in a unified, comprehensive and robust manner.